WalkerTek Blog

Our iPad waiting for its new home...

There is a lot of buzz on twitter if you do a search for iPad Giveaway. It seems to be a great way for companies to increase followers and gain some attention. We are one of the companies doing an iPad giveaway, but wanted to give you a behind the scenes look at the marketing and logistics as well.

A twitter promotion typically goes like this…
1. You have to follow the main company (or person)
2. You have to retweet a specific message to your followers
3. A random follower is selected as a winner

We wanted to include some of the other social media platforms in our giveaway, so we are also going to run the promotion on Facebook and LinkedIn. Here’s how…

We have established a contest rules page. That page will be the center of the campaign. It will contain information allowing people to connect with us through Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Each of the messages that people post to enter the contest will contain a link to this page.

Twitter is easy to manage. We can do a search for our company name and/or URL and get the list of everyone that tweeted the message. LinkedIn and Facebook are a little more difficult, which is why you don’t typically see promotions like this on those platforms.

We connect to LinkedIn and Facebook using custom applications that we developed which will allow us to track status updates. People that post the messages will automatically be added into the contest database.

We are going to aggregate all of the qualified entrants from the three different sites into a single pool and select a winner at random.

We want to embrace the world of social media, but we don’t want to restrict ourselves to a single platform, as such we came up with a system that will allow us to run cross-platform promotions allowing people to participate in whichever manner they prefer.

The contest will run from April 12th through April 16th and the prize will be shipped out on the 19th.

Once the campaign is completed, we will provide stats on our blog showing the results, including the following:

• Increase in followers
• Increase in Fans
• Increase in Connections
• Estimated total exposure

In addition, we hope to learn more about the logistics of running a promotion on each of the sites so we can utilize that information for our clients going forward.

Our baseline statistics are:

Wish us luck and if you are interested in entering for yourself, visit our contest page. To follow the behind the scenes action, keep an eye on our blog.